Awkwardly clutching her guitar and a parcel of cherries, a street musician hitches up her skirt to facilitate her steps as she exits a Parisian café. Manet captures the very moment she emerges: the hinged café doors have swung backward following her exit, revealing seated customers and a waiter in a crisp white apron. Antonin Proust recalled Manet, as the quintessential "flâneur," bearing witness to this scene while strolling the city streets, even allegedly asking the performer to pose for him. When she refused, Manet restaged the moment in his studio, casting in her place his favorite model, Victorine Meurent (46.846). The instantaneity of the depicted moment impelled the critic Émile Zola to commend Manet’s ability to “state frankly what he sees.” Other critics were unimpressed by Manet’s paint handling, with Paul Mantz declaring that “because of an abnormality we find deeply disturbing, the eyebrows lose their horizontal position and slide vertically down the nose, like two commas of shadow.”

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